MEDIA COOL

MEDIA COOL

This Month’s Media Cool was written by Karen Schlosberg, Bob Nevin, Richard C. Walls and Richard Riegel

LIGHT OF DAY (Tri-Star)

Those expecting one long MTV video would be better off at the new Stallone flick, since director/writer Paul Schrader has crafted an emotional family drama centering on the relationships between brother and sister Joe and Patti Rasnick (Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett), their manipulative mother (Gena Rowlands) and ineffectual father (Jason Miller). Though the flawed screenplay is beyond repair, the four leads pull nuances and textures out of thin air, making the film absorbing in spite of its gaping holes. Fox bravely and successfully takes on a passive, almost supporting role, for the central dynamics are intended to be between Patti and her mother. Rowlands turns in a scary, deliberately ambiguous and magnetic performance, but the film ultimately belongs to Jett, who, in her acting debut, is perfectly intense as the driven, angry and anguished Patti, trying to live for an idea within a society of rules. That ethos makes this more of a rock ’n’ roll film than the scads of contemptible pretenders from Flashdance on. K.S.

PLATOON

(Orion)

Platoon is the most realistic depiction yet of the insanity and futility of the Vietnam war. Written and directed by ’Nam vet Oliver Stone, Platoon doesn’t exorcise demons, assuage guilt or make excuses. Rather, it’s a glimpse of the fears and conflicts within and amongst the young “grunts”; fears resolved in a steaming deathland far from home. And while the firefights, medical evacuations, village torchings and brutalization of civilians were daily after-dinner fare for armchair America, the strong support for Platoon by Vietnam vets everywhere indicates that this film sets a new standard for bringing the war back home B.N.

JANE BRODY’S GOOD

FOOD BOOK by Jane Brody (Norton)

Whoa ... according to | this book I should have been dead about 10 years ago. Actually, I’ve maintained that my weight was about perfect, it’s just that I’m three feet too short. But seriously folks, if you’re looking for a diet book (“diet” as in what you eat, not as in threemonth plan) that doesn’t belong in the UFO’s Are Mutilating Our Cattle section of your bookstore, then this it. Without giving away too much of the I’ll just say that Brody recommends we eat less fat and more complex carbohydrates, more grain and nuts and beans—in short, less like 20th century consumers and more like the Flintstones. This way we cannot only be healthy now, but live to a ripe old age “unmarred by chronic, fun-robbing illness,” which is Brody’s way of warning us that cancer of the colon can cut into one’s shuffleboard time. Ail this and a ton of reciples— and I haven’t even mentioned the part about the potato (not that you’d believe me if I did!). R.C.W.

WHAT HAPPENED TO KEROUAC?

(New Yorker Films)

The party line among the Jack Kerouac cultists is that this documentary is much better than the recent Kerouac, which I already raved to the skies in the July ’86 CREEM. However, now that I’ve seen both movies, I find them equally worthwhile, as more Kerouac is never enough among us obsessives. What Happened to Kerouac? features even more interviews with Kerouac intimates, including two conspicuous absentees from the earlier film: Jack’s daughter, Jan Kerouac, and his old poet pal Gregory Corso, complete with terminally askew glasses and wonderful youse-guyz voice. But unless you’re already familiar with Kerouac’s writings, it’s somewhat difficult to tell from What Happened To Kerouac? just why all these interviewees grow so misty-eyed rapturous in discussing their Jack. It wouldn’t hurt to see both films if you want to begin exploring the beautifully intertwined truth and fiction of Jack Kerouac’s life; I’d be glad to watch a double teatuie of Kerouac and this over and over in the all-nite theatre of the universe. R.R.

LAB

(L.A. Blues Fanzine)

This guy Eddie Flowers keeps popping up at all the crucial junctures of rockwriting history. Sympathy for the devilish critics and all that, but it’s true: Flowers was published in the legendary Flash fanzine while he was a mere ’Bama pube fry; he migrated to Bloomington, IN, just in time for that scene’s fertile-myrtle mid-’70s explosion; and by 1980 he was installed in Los-fuggin’-Angeles, with high hopes of engaging in some Day Of The Locust subcultural anthropology. Flowers has been publishing his Californicatin’ tabulations in many a fanzine (his own and the generics) since he arrived, and by now he’s ready to go nationwide (Col. Sanders his inspiration) with the new eight-page, super-legible LAB. Contains more and more of Eddie’s “personal” opinions on records, movies, tapes, other ’zines. And Eddie’s got good ones (opinions, that is). Critprose in the still-essential Meltzerian mode: “I know it’s not unlistenable because I listened to it.” Awrite! A 12-issue sub of LAB is $10 from P.O. Box 1373, Culver City, CA 90232. R.R.